The Disembodied Wound of The Piano Tuner of Earthquakes: The Quay Brothers' 'Homage' to Chris Marker

Discourse, 34.2–3, Spring/Fall 2012, pp. 209–00. Copyright © 2013 Wayne State University Press, Detroit, Michigan 48201-1309. ISSN 1522-5321.

The Disembodied Wound of The Piano Tuner of Earthquakes: The Quay Brothers’

“Homage to Chris Marker”

Rebecca A. Sheehan

“Who says time heals all wounds? Time heals everything but wounds. No, instead it encircles them until what remains is a wound disembodied.”

—Chris Marker, Sans Soleil

“These things never happen but are always.”

—Sallust, quoted in the epigraph to The Piano Tuner of Earthquakes

The Brothers Quay set their 2005 !lm, The Piano Tuner of Earth-quakes, to a memorable theme song, the very same one that accom-panies the still images of a man’s memory of love and loss in Chris Marker’s La Jetée (1962). The song evokes that boy on the pier at Orly before World War III, his con!nement by the victors and his memories, frozen in time, of encounters with a woman, the image of whose face has marked him. The Quays tell us in the interview that accompanies the DVD of The Piano Tuner of Earthquakes—hereafter

210 Rebecca A. Sheehan

referred to as The Piano Tuner—that the last thing they wanted was a “love theme” for the !lm but that it was their “homage to Chris Marker.”1 They go on to explain that the song was originally writ-ten for a ballet titled The Unwanted, which was !tting because when they located the original recording in the Boosey and Hawkes music library, it was in such poor shape that it had to be restored for use in their !lm. This musical choice suggests more intrinsic and, so far, critically overlooked sympathies between the work of Marker and the Brothers Quay. Looking at the Quays’ !lm in the context of Marker’s oeuvre clari!es how the uncanny intersections of the animate and inanimate and, by extension, life and death function in their work. The spirit of Marker haunts their cinema, and attention to Marker’s traces in this !lm illuminates the man-ner in which their stop-motion animation techniques and the cin-ematic apparatus it intimates produce a commentary on history and time. The epigraph from Sallust that opens The Piano Tuner—“These things never happen but are always”—reveals a set of con-nections between Marker and the Quays regarding the haunting effects of temporal con"icts between past and present, history and memory, event and duration. Sallust’s words illuminate the philo-sophical dimension of the Quays’ process of stop-motion anima-tion as well as the desires that consume the characters in their !lm. Working with theorizations of Marker’s notion of “a wound disembodied” introduced in his 1983 !lm Sans Soleil, the essay explores how the body distinctly !gured in The Piano Tuner marks the intersection of Sallust’s paradoxical claims, at once subject to historical events that happen or never happen while also resisting the singularity of these events with a psychic locus that posits alter-native possibilities through the memory of and desire for those things that never happen.

Through the technique of stop-motion animation, a succes-sion of still images are edited together to create an illusion of live-action motion, bringing puppets to life and permitting inanimate objects to move seemingly on their own. Just as this process allows the still image to animate or reanimate detritus in the Quays’ !lms, the series of still images in La Jetée promise to bring back to life beings that don’t move in their present reality, such as the taxider-mied animals and statues depicted in Marker’s !lm. The qualita-tive difference between the living and dead collapses in the still images of taxidermied animals caught midsnarl or in mid"ight in La Jetée. Such images potentially contest the photograph’s arresting effect by underscoring its paradoxical animation: the stuffed ani-mals appear to have been alive when the photograph was taken. In The Piano Tuner, the uncanny effects of the animation-deanimation

The Disembodied Wound 211

dyad spread to the con"icts between self and other, interior and exterior, within its narrative’s characters. The melancholia of the abducted opera singer Malvina van Stille and the fetishism of her abductor Dr. Droz appear driven by wounds disembodied, by mem-ories and desires that persist and haunt despite their embodied absences. The out-of-joint temporal qualities of these characters’ conditions produce wrinkles in linear time in these !lms while also positing a sense of the body that extends beyond its physical limbs and limits to the realm of the phantomic. The wound disembodied thus allegorizes the manner in which both the Quays and Marker produce a cinema attuned to the untimely and the virtual, wherein things are always or never happen but remain in the realm of the possible.

The Untimely Wound

La Jetée is a short science !ction !lm that consists almost entirely of still images. The !lm features a man with especially strong memories who has survived the fallout from World War III. Impris-oned by the German-speaking victors whose whispers we hear over images of the man wearing an eye mask, he is connected to a time machine that, his captors hope, will permit him to inhabit the places he remembers so vividly. The captive is detained by the Germans because of his strong memories of a time before the war, memories dominated by the recurring image of a woman’s face and moments spent walking around a peacetime Paris with her. The still photographs in La Jetée, in contrast to the moving image of most !lms, !nd an echo in the stop-motion animation vignettes that supplement the live-action sequences of The Piano Tuner.

Both !lms experiment with what persists out of time both narratively, in terms of events that take place and memories that endure, and formally, in terms that relate to !lm’s material appara-tus and the interplay of still and moving images. The Quays’ stop-motion technique manufactures a continuous time from otherwise discontinuous images, pointing to while also denying us a time that remains elsewhere, offscreen. Marker’s still images pluck moments from a time that remains apart from the duration of La Jetée. His concept of the wound disembodied helps clarify the manners in which these two !lms explore the relation of temporality and the untimely, especially as it relates to the body. Marker’s impossible !gure evokes the last peaceful moments before the outbreak of World War III in La Jetée, the image of the woman’s face that marks the man who survives its fallout and the man whose death this


image memorializes by acting as both a screen to and a memorial of his !nal moments.

The marking image in La Jetée of a woman on the pier at Orly, like the wound disembodied of Sans Soleil, does not dissipate or heal over time. It persists. It insists. It captivates. It recurs fre-quently enough that the prisoner’s detainers hope that their cap-tive can potentially return to and inhabit that image of the past, separated or disembodied as it is from the increasingly uninhabit-able present.

The interruption of the present by images of the past, wherein the untimely confronts the actual, is evident both within La Jetée’s diegesis (as the man’s photographic memories of the past invade the time of his present) and beyond that diegesis, as the present !ctional bombed-out city is represented by photographs of the rubble of real cities in the past following World War II. This inter-ruption permits the out-of-time to pervade and problematize a linear conception of historical time. Such interruptions feature prominently in The Piano Tuner and its depiction of the abduction of the opera signer Malvina van Stille the night before her wed-ding. The name “van Stille” offers our !rst insight into the role she will play in the !lm. She is described by the signi!er of two kinds of absences, that of silence and stillness (the double meaning of “Stille” in German). The name signals the ways in which her body occupies the paradox of Sallust’s lines, being both present and absent, just as things that never happen but are always. In the !lm’s narrative, Malvina collapses in the middle of a performance. After falsely declaring Malvina dead to her !ancé, Adolfo, the jealous Dr. Droz takes the singer to his island asylum. We are introduced to the island through Felisberto, a piano tuner commissioned by the doctor to ply his trade servicing seven automatons designed to aid in some unspeci!ed way in a “!nal performance”: a revisionary reenactment of Malvina’s abduction.

The automatons are boxlike machines whose proportions remain visually unspeci!ed. The Quays generally avoid giving establishing shots showing the automatons and their context, opt-ing instead for close-ups that feature their various scenes behind glass. On the island, the doctor and his assistant Assumpta claim that Malvina has been traumatized by her !ancé jilting her on the night before their wedding, a story that the spectator knows—or suspects, given the opening scenes—to be untrue. The doctor ultimately convinces the piano tuner to play the part of Adolfo in the reenactment (both characters are played by the same actor, Cesar Sarachu), and the !nal scene features Adolfo in the audi-ence of the reenactment performed by the bodies of Malvina and


Felisberto/Adolfo, who are manipulated like life-sized puppets by sticks and strings. As the Adolfo on stage walks away from Malvina, who is dressed in a wedding gown, he encounters his re"ection in the audience. Removing his beard and a toupee, he returns to Malvina but this time looks like Felisberto. As an earthquake strikes the set, Adolfo thus both abandons Malvina and returns to her, albeit in an altered form. This paradoxical narrative event is rep-resentative of Sallust’s event that both does and does not happen. The fact that Adolfo and Felisberto are played by the same actor locates the body as a mediator of the wound disembodied: Adolfo’s return to Malvina as Felisberto is a failed reunion, despite the fact that it is physically satis!ed, for Felisberto occupies the same body as Adolfo. The wound of Adolfo’s jilting remains disembodied as it persists, despite the reunion of the actual embodied characters. As Sandor Krasna notes in Sans Soleil, “With time, the hurt of separa-tion loses its real limits. With time, the desired body will soon dis-appear, and if the desiring body has already ceased to exist for the other, then what remains is a wound, disembodied.” The hurt of Malvina’s separation from Adolfo, even as it stems from mispercep-tion, has no corporeal limit.

On the island, Felisberto attempts to make contact with Malvina, who constantly mistakes him for Adolfo. The Quays inter-cut these scenes with her performance in the !lm’s !rst scene, making it clear that she so compulsively remembers the moment of parting from her love that she thinks she is still on the stage performing. On a bench looking out to sea, Malvina thinks she is at the performance, saying to Felisberto, “All these lights, these people. Tomorrow we marry. Everyone can hear my voice.” In a strange relay that echoes the situation of the prisoner in La Jetée, Malvina’s mind remains in the past while her body exists in the present on the shore, at the edge of the doctor’s island. Her physi-cal presence on the edge of the island symbolizes the cleavage of her existence, situated between two time spaces: she psychically inhabits the past, as if a distant shore, while she physically inhabits the present. She remarks in another scene that “I’m neither in this world or the next, tell me who I am, tell me I’m me.” Meanwhile, the doctor harbors an insatiable desire for Malvina’s voice, at one point remarking to Felisberto that “There’s no country, no city, no theatre or recital I haven’t been to for that voice.” As the singing voice is not something capable of being possessed but is only expe-rienced as ephemeral, the doctor’s pursuit of it implies a desire forever displaced. The reenactment of his capture of Malvina’s body can only relive the approximation of his mastery over her voice. The disembodied mouths, tongues, and teeth that feature


in the dioramas contained within the island’s automatons and also in the doctor’s workshop concretize the fetishistic elements of the doctor’s desire. For both Malvina and the doctor, the abduction acts as a wound disembodied from time that, like the image of the woman’s face in La Jetée, is at once habitable and uninhabitable in the present by both captive and captor.

The disembodied wound realizes Sallust’s claim: “These things never happen but are always.” The past, in this circumstance, per-sists as a haunting and constitutive memory without ever assuming its proper place in time’s continuum as an event. In Threshold of the Visible World, Kaja Silverman discusses the disembodied wound of Sans Soleil in a manner that is instructive for understanding its rela-tionship to time and to memory in the context of the Quays’ !lm. Silverman argues that Sans Soleil “remembers” and encourages the viewer to “remember” what might best be characterized as “other people’s memories.”2 This inhabitation of “other people’s memo-ries” also describes the project of the victors in La Jetée. Indeed, the “extended dramatization of and meditation upon the operations of memory” performed by both of Marker’s !lms resonates with The Piano Tuner.3 This is the case for Malvina, whose memories com-pete with the doctor’s version of history and for the !lm’s specta-tors, who are asked to choose between the doctor’s and Assumpta’s rendition of events and Malvina’s memory.

Silverman observes that Sans Soleil “twice counterposes the act of remembering not to forgetting . . . but to what it calls ‘his-tory,’ in the of!cial and synchronic sense of that word.”4 The act of remembering—a literal putting together—provides, according to Silverman, a “psychic locus” for the “foreclosed wound of the past,” which “persists” despite its expulsion from a “human residence,” its corporeal presence. Arguing that memories destabilize history with “time,” Silverman posits that in Marker’s !lm, history pres-ents the “endless perpetuation of the same,” while time provides drift and discontinuity.5 The image that represents the potentially inhabitable memory of the detained man in La Jetée can also be per-ceived as a point of uncertainty and contingency that has become dislodged from history’s continuum. Here, the stillness of the pho-tographic image—whose movement is temporal rather than physi-cal—challenges the !lm’s duration with a site of discontinuity, just as the disembodied wound interrupts history.

Mary Ann Doane theorizes that early photography de!ed stan-dardizations of time in the late 19th century. The snapshot threat-ened temporal systematicity with the instant removed from time, producing a !gure of “meaninglessness, pure and uncontrollable contingency.”6 The image of the woman that marks the prisoner


becomes enigmatically persistent and atemporal, revealing con-tingency as it works to undermine the direction of history in the !lm’s narrative. La Jetée likewise uses documentary images from World War II to juxtapose what might be thought of as known rep-resentations of history, embodied by photographs of cities in the aftermath of the war, with the unknown or unrepresentable, the moments leading up to or following the ones recorded by these photographs that are not shown. These are the moments that make the same images employable in the representation of other wars at other times, in this case a !ctional war. The documentary ele-ment of these photographs of historical events is eroded by La Jetée, which transforms them into images that, in their remove from his-torical time, become repurposed and recontextualized. This use of the documentary image challenges the idea of history as a series of events that may be faithfully recorded, made visible, or even kept in the past.

Marker takes advantage of the contingent qualities of the still image to potentially (re)animate taxidermied animals during scenes in which the man and the woman walk through the Museum of Natural History. While Marker’s photographs restore a moment of wild indeterminacy to the images of (dead) animals, the Quays use stop-motion animation to give life to inanimate objects in scenes where, among other magical events, screws unscrew them-selves and puppets move unaided by strings or human hands. These experiments with the still image do not use it to stop move-ment or pause time but instead create movement and open up temporal possibilities. Their effect is uncanny. These uses of the apparatus riddle the supposed certainty of the photographic image with uncertainty, representing an image of the past while drawing our attention to the possibilities of what exists before, between, and beyond the moment encountered therein.

The Quays develop an indirect approach to narration. They often use peripheral or partially heard dialogue rather than direct explication, recalling the fragments of the captors’ dialogue in La Jetée. The Piano Tuner privileges gestures and nonverbal sound to express something beyond dialogue.7 The reality of a sensation generated in the spectator by uncertain causes—a partially heard remark, an incomplete sentence spoken by a character in The Piano Tuner, the unexplained expression on the woman’s face at Orly, and the muttering of German voices in La Jetée—creates a sense of ambi-guity, dissonance, and incompletion. In an interview that accom-panies the DVD of The Piano Tuner, the Quays return repeatedly to the lines by Sallust, discussing the phrase as a reference not only to a metaphorical universe but also to the ambiguity between “what is


real and what is false.”8 The epistemological and perceptual uncer-tainty of uncanny experiences issues a challenge to stable history that is similar to the disembodied wound theorized by Silverman. This uncertainty functions as an opening for contingency within narrative, riddling an apparently complete and stable history with the irruption of the unknown, the contingent, and the imagined.

The Unrequited Gaze

Marker’s mobilization of the still image in La Jetée is apposite for a reading of the Quays’ !lm. Eli Friedlander, in his analysis of La Jetée, argues that in its still images, the !lm engages in a conscious search for what spectators unconsciously seek in other “motion” pictures: a returned gaze.9 But the search for this af!rmation of our being through a gaze returned is often met with the nonresponsive, inhu-man, and indifferent gaze of the camera, suffusing such animated and animating images of life with the shadow of death. Friedland-er’s analysis of the gaze of the woman in La Jetée—which provides the only instances of moving images in the !lm, in the guise of her eyes "uttering open—can be extended to note that despite the familiarity we gain with her through repetition, her gaze’s impetus and its object remain enigmatic, unknown, throughout most of the !lm. We do not know what appears to frighten her on the pier, and we do not know where she is looking or from whose perspective we are looking throughout our encounters with her gaze (!gure 1). La Jetée’s image of the woman on the pier at Orly, as it endures beyond an instant and as it recurs throughout the !lm, recalls the prolonged gaze required of the subject of early daguerreotypes due to the technology’s long exposure time. This image unsettles the subject’s sense of aliveness through its deathly stillness and the inhuman source of its unrecognizing gaze.

La Jetée’s returns to this photographic image of the woman on the pier suggestively undermines its ability to incarnate a singular instant. Rather, the instantaneous nature of the photograph is chal-lenged by the endurance that it grants to its subject’s gaze, a gaze that becomes disembodied, capable of constantly destabilizing the present’s place in a diachronic history in the !lm through return-ing as the past to become also the present and the future. The uncertainty of the context surrounding the photographic subject (who or what she is looking at) recalls the surprising unease expe-rienced by early photographers of regarding and being regarded by their subjects when photographed—according to Walter Benja-min, whether “the tiny faces in the pictures could see us”10—while


also pointing to the uncertainty of whether the photograph really can represent a singular instant and whether such an instant even exists. These moments reveal a paradox that replicates the enigma of the object of the woman’s gaze in La Jetée and the gaze of daguerreotypy’s early subjects; through photography, time both does and does not stop and is reduced or contained to an instant while also being extended and multiplied. Just as the prolonged gaze necessitated by the long exposure time of daguerreotypy con-fronts the actuality of duration with the perceived instantaneity of the capture of time of the apparatus, so too Marker’s illumination of the enigma surrounding the photograph of the woman on the pier creates a struggle between the arrested moment of the past, dislocated from history through its repetitions and through the endurance of the subject’s gaze, and the moments surrounding this instant, the historical time that remains unknown to the spectator.

La Jetée uses the photograph as a location for both the timely and its dislocations. The photograph documents the past as history while also permitting the woman’s gaze to become disembodied and disjointed from history through repetition and thus wrinkles the apparently straight lines of historical time. Marker’s photo-graph, which through repetition begins to act contingently rather than causally, informs but also haunts The Piano Tuner. The conti-nuity of history and the contingency of memory are underscored in the epigraph by Sallust as equal yet paradoxical elements of time, the historical and the untimely, things that, like the disembodied

Figure 1. The woman on the pier at Orly.


wound, are always available through what Silverman identi!es as a “psychic locus,” even when they are physically absent or apart.

The inhuman gaze and lack of recognition inherent to the camera that Benjamin describes extends to the confrontation that Friedlander locates in La Jetée wherein the spectator’s knowledge that !lm is “an illusion of unity” meets the pleasure taken from that illusion nevertheless. Friedlander notes that the “magical moment of cinematic illusion raises the question of this returned gaze [of the animated world] itself being an illusion.”11 The Piano Tuner contains numerous instances of unrequited gazes or characters that look past one another, embodying the dissonance between the spectator’s gaze upon the world of the !lm and the physically disuni!ed way it “looks” back. Malvina’s catatonic gaze in which she cannot recognize Felisberto as anyone but Adolfo and her remark that “They say it’s bad luck to look at each other on the eve of your wedding” emphasize the gaze as a site and relay of sights of missed recognition in the !lm. The Quays often cut away from scenes of Felisberto looking out into the woods to scenes featuring a puppet chopping wood who brie"y pauses to look up at the camera. With-out an establishing shot putting Felisberto and the puppet in the same space, it is unclear whether they are looking at each other or whether the puppet, in looking directly at the camera, is looking at us; this is compounded by the uncanny impression that a lifeless puppet is “looking” at anything at all (!gures 2 and 3). The photo-graphic subject looks beyond the inhuman nature of the camera’s gaze, treating it as if it could look back, as if it were looking at her, just as the cinematic spectator must look past evidence of illusion unless it becomes so great as to intrude upon his enjoyment of the !lm.12 In both cases, the gaze occupies both the knowledge that what we look upon (be it the camera’s eye or the !lm’s world) is illusory and the belief in these things as if they were nevertheless real. This returns us again to Sallust’s aphorism. Belief persists as a form of always that, like the disembodied wound of Marker’s Sans Soleil, interrupts historical reality, the knowledge of the unreturned gaze, the absence of these “things that never happen,” with the willingness to look beyond or to continue looking despite our gaze being unrequited.

The Disembodied Nature of Disavowal

The disavowal in Sallust’s lines works and expresses itself in the characters and cinematic apparatuses of the !lms under analy-sis in the form of melancholia and fetishism, two psychoanalytic


concepts that negotiate cleavages between knowledge and belief, and describes the division of the subject between self and other. For the melancholic, embodied by the character of Malvina, her lost love object is incorporated by her memories that take on the status of a present reality. The melancholic, consisting of that which is at once lost (the relationship with the love object shat-tered) and maintained within the ego’s constitution, secures an identity that rests at once upon reality and the wished for. Similarly, fetishism’s structure of disavowal summarized by the phrase “Je sais bien mais quand même” (“I know very well, but all the same”) rests upon an ambivalence in the subject who maintains the belief that he can attain the object of his desire while knowing that ful!llment

Figures 2–3. The camera cuts from Felisberto, looking out to sea, to a pup-pet of a woodcutter, looking up as if looking back.


is impossible. This characteristic of the doctor’s desire is perhaps best summarized by an exchange with Felisberto in the forest of the island.

D#. D#$%: You must come from a long line of piano tuners.F&'()*&#+$: For three centuries we Fernandezes have never had children.D#. D#$%: Then how were you born?F&'()*&#+$: Ah, doctor, that is the secret of our sainted mothers.D#. D#$%: So we have destiny to thank for allowing us to become what we

will become to each other.

After this conversation, Felisberto thinks to himself that “It seemed the doctor and I had reached an understanding.” This understand-ing betrays the doctor’s sympathies with the story’s practice of dis-avowal: the knowledge that the Fernandez women obviously had children, of which Felisberto is himself living proof, and the main-tenance of a belief that the “sainted” mothers never had children or, more to the point, sex.

Dr. Droz’s fetishism (for Malvina’s voice, which he knows he can’t possess but pursues nevertheless) and Malvina’s melancholia (in which she yearns to inhabit a moment while “knowing” that it is in the past) could stand alongside the examples of the uncanny evoked by Freud in his reading of E. T. A. Hoffmann’s 1816 story “Der Sandmann.” Like Nathanial, the protagonist of Hoffmann’s tale, who falls in love with Olimpia, an automaton he takes for a woman, the melancholic Malvina and the fetishist Dr. Droz under-score an ambiguous, unresolved copresence of the actual and the imagined. The Quays’ characters share the preoccupation of Hoff-mann’s story with the ocular and particularly with unreturned, automatic gazes (the gazes of automatons) and a tendency to look past one another.

The uncanny status of automatons, dolls, and puppets empha-sizes the uncertain status of bodies made quite tangible in the Quays’ !lm through a series of shots near its conclusion. We see Felisberto’s face being shaved by hands that could at !rst be mis-taken as his own, and we also see Malvina’s hair being arranged in the same fashion, by hands that could or should be her own but are not. This estrangement of the body is !nalized during the reen-actment of the abduction in which the bodies of the characters are physically manipulated like dolls. As with the body that, in the case of the melancholic, is part self and part other, a cohabitation of two otherwise opposing entities in The Piano Tuner ensues. One entity is timeless or outside of time: the photograph, the memory, the fetishist’s and the melancholic’s desire for and belief in the


unattainable, that which “is always” for Sallust. The other entity is timely or within time: the photogram, the fetishist’s and melan-cholic’s knowledge of the impossibility of their desires, and that which “never happens” for Sallust.

The Germans who detain the main character of La Jetée subject him to a time machine that enables him to travel to the past and also encounter the people of the future through the still images of his memory. The time machine that takes the man’s mind to another time while (c)leaving his body in the present provides a compelling basis for understanding Malvina’s response to her abduction in The Piano Tuner. Not only does it suggest the presence of a real split in consciousness caused by her traumatic separation from her lover, but it also helps to make sense of the temporal !ssures that envelop the !lm. Between the scene of the abduc-tion and its restaging in the future as well as the history of Malvina being abducted by the doctor (the story we witness in the !lm’s !rst scenes) or jilted by Dr. Droz’s automaton of Adolfo (in the !nal reenactment), coexistences of contradictory knowledge and belief, the true and the false, are at odds with one another in a way that is symptomatic of schisms that drive fetishism as well as melancholia. Malvina, like the prisoner in La Jetée, exists outside of the time of her captor. She also inhabits her own world of the past that trans-lates into fantasies she embodies in her mind (articulated by the !lm’s cutting from her looking out onto the ocean to her dressed in the green dress she was wearing the night of the performance). Malvina’s desire for a past moment within her present on the island causes her abduction to stand out from the continuum of time, encircled by the doctor’s fetishistic attempt to reenact this past event in a performance that is at once the same, the past lived over again, and necessarily different. The doctor’s !xation, like that of the victors in La Jetée, is with the inhabitation of the out-of-time as he writes an alternate history in which Malvina was jilted by her lover. Dislocated from a point in time and echoing ambiguously in the present, the abduction is not just the “open wound” Freud uses to metaphorize melancholia’s inability to properly cathect loss but instead suggests itself as the disembodied wound.

In “Mourning and Melancholia,” Freud draws a sharp distinc-tion between the melancholic and the mourner. He refers to mel-ancholia as “pathological mourning,” precipitated by a refusal to acknowledge loss.13 While the mourner may properly cathect or process the loss of the object-choice to which her libido is attached, the melancholic retains her identi!cation with the lost object, unable and perhaps unwilling to effectively come to terms with its loss. That Adolfo may have jilted Malvina forms the basis for


the manufacture of melancholia, the “real slight or disappoint-ment coming from this loved person.”14 As a consequence, Malvina becomes split between her “real” self on the island and her “false” sense of self in the history Droz has written, with the moment of her separation from her love (deliberate or forced) producing a disembodied wound, the “psychic locus,” that destabilizes the pres-ent and the narrative. Malvina’s compromised agency, held captive by Droz and by the lost past, thus becomes the source of ironic pos-sibilities, as the unknown and unfamiliar destabilize the acknowl-edged version of events, the history that is told over events that go untold. A striking visual suggestion of this split in Malvina’s agency, culminating in the !nal scene in which her body is used by the doctor as a puppet, occurs near the beginning of the !lm in which Malvina embraces Adolfo after the !rst performance of the opera and casts an ominous glance of herself in a cracked mirror. This glance at once transforms her into a disembodied image (an image we later learn that the doctor’s automatons are capable of captur-ing and manipulating but also one that resists the doctor’s control and narrative) and imposes a schism across her face, a visualization of the melancholic’s psychic fracture (!gure 4).

Malvina’s melancholia depends upon and mimics the mechan-ics of Dr. Droz’s fetishism. Malvina’s loss can be neither fully acknowledged nor denied and must remain at once present and absent, like the object of Droz’s fetishism, her voice (which, like music, exists in time but not in space). Rebecca Comay argues in “The Sickness of Tradition: Between Melancholia and Fetishism” that the structure of melancholia begins to “bleed into that of

Figure 4. The foreshadowing schism of Malvina’s re" ection.


fetishism—the compensatory construction of imaginary unities in response to a traumatic loss (‘castration’) which structurally can be neither fully acknowledged or denied.”15 The persistence of a loss that cannot be restituted in the case of Malvina’s melancho-lia echoes the persistence of Droz’s desire for Malvina, which is always kept from being satis!ed due to the repetition of the night of her abduction as well as the proxies for her body (especially her tongue) and her voice. Dr. Droz’s fetishism is at once faithful to the singular object but also willing to indulge in always inadequate approximations of it. His double loyalty to Malvina and to his maid, Assumpta, who looks in every way like an older version of Malvina, reveals the perpetuation of the split between the possessed and lost object. As Droz wishes Malvina would, Assumpta sings to him but also carries out his sexual fantasies. The doctor’s automatons cap-ture and replicate image and voice, as Felisberto encounters later in the !lm. At one point, the doctor describes himself to Felisberto as being “like certain opera fans who listen only with their clitoris.” He then presents Felisberto with an elaborate diagram of a human tongue that looks anatomically similar to a clitoris.

Considering this diagram from the viewpoint of Freud’s narra-tive of fetishism, it is easy to recognize that the supposed absence of a penis encountered by the male child upon seeing his mother naked has been substituted by the tongue/clitoris. According to Freud, the fetishist develops a desire for an object (the thing viewed after the traumatic childhood realization that his mother, unlike him, has no penis) that acts as a substitute for the presence of the penis, at once masking and attesting to its absence. The doctor’s obsession with the voice and the tongue are rife with this kind of substitution, from the tongue’s similarity to the clitoris to the metonymic approximation of the voice to the tongue. It is also no surprise that the doctor is portrayed as a collector, an exem-plary !gure for the fetishist. The disembodied tongues featured throughout the !lm are always surrounded and threatened by potentially castrating teeth. For example, the piano tuner dreams of disembodied teeth gnashing a giant tongue, perhaps an ele-ment from one of the dioramas of the doctor’s automatons. At one point, Assumpta tells the piano tuner that “Sometimes when I lace up my shoes, I notice only afterwards that my tongue, which I had assumed was inside, is still hanging outside.” As Giorgio Agamben explains in Stanzas, “because the fetish is a negation and the sign of an absence, it is not an unrepeatable unique object; on the con-trary, it is something in!nitely capable of substitution, without any of its successive incarnations ever exhausting the nullity of which it is a symbol.”16 This appears to be true of the numerous ways in


which the tongue, symbolizing the doctor’s desire for Malvina’s voice, appears throughout the !lm, often disembodied or sur-rounded by the threat of castrating teeth, the vision of castration being a motivating factor for the development of fetishism. Droz’s desire remains unsatis!able, its object “in!nitely capable of substi-tution,” hence his willingness to indulge and invest in objects that will only approximate and never ful!ll that desire, just as Malvina’s loss cannot be metabolized properly, her memory of Adolfo keep-ing him present while his real presence remains impossible.

Here La Jetée’s form is translated into the dynamics of fetish-ism and melancholia in The Piano Tuner. Like the still images that compose La Jetée, Malvina’s voice, Droz’s fetish, is always present as a simulacrum, a surrogate that surpasses time through its abil-ity to generate in!nite proxies, just as the woman’s face on the pier at Orly becomes dislocated from time through its repetition. Just as Droz’s desire comes to depend upon and consist of its own lack of ful!llment, premised as it is upon representations, repeti-tions, and automatons, the duration of La Jetée depends upon its own negation. Its reality is premised upon the degrees to which it evades representing reality. Furthermore, just as the photograph virtually animates the taxidermied animals, affording an imag-ined past to a moment turned contingent, La Jetée’s evasion of the image in time permits the !lm to occupy a temporal present that is perpetually created by elsewhere. The !lm negotiates between its photographic representations, its narration, and its reception in the mind of its spectator, who like the time traveler must create an inhabitable space between the sounds of the present and the images of the past. For the time traveler, the image that has marked him permits the possibilities inherent to the contingencies of the photographic: using an image of the past to !nd a place for the present depends upon denuding it of the continuities and causali-ties of history surrounding it.

The Contingent Nature of Body Parts

A !nal set of more literal forms of disembodiment in The Piano Tuner merits comment. Malvina’s loss of her true love creates a disembodied wound: a loss identi!ed with and constitutive of the self, a “psychic locus” that is nevertheless physically unrealized. During a rehearsal for the reenactment of the performance that was originally interrupted by Malvina’s abduction, the doctor bites Felisberto, to whom he has assigned the part of Adolfo, on the lips, drawing blood. The doctor then forces Felisberto to kiss Malvina,


transferring the blood like lipstick. Not only does this suggest the real disembodied nature of the wound for which the doctor’s bite stands in (the abduction from Adolfo), but it also symbolizes quite unsubtly the deferred nature of the doctor’s desire (which here can only be addressed to Malvina through Felisberto as proxy). This desire becomes a stamp, a repeatable sign of and substitute for itself. That the blood doubles as lipstick underlines Malvina’s status as a feminine fetish (the scene is intercut with Assumpta, wearing bright red lipstick, looking on) and incorporates her as a substitute into the event that creates her own disembodied wound. The self-alienation of her melancholia as she longs for but cannot recover her lost love object, Adolfo, identi!ed with her former self, is underlined here by her role as the always substituted object upon which Droz’s fetishism relies.

As an inmate of Dr. Droz’s island asylum, Malvina is often por-trayed thrashing in her sleep or resisting restraint, a representa-tion reminiscent of the hysterical attitudes passionnelles catalogued by Dr. Jean-Martin Charcot in L’Iconographie photographique de La Salpetriere.17 The emphasis placed on Malvina’s body is part of the Quays’ overarching interest in the continuum between living body and inanimate thing, including the location of life in the detri-tus of industry. Tyrus Miller offers a description of what he calls the Quays’ “fetishistic urbanism”: “this paradoxical impulse, this attempt to arrest the ineluctable movement of the commodity on its circulatory course from fashionability to outmodedness, never really succeeds in reanimating a lost freshness. Instead, it produces a repetitive life-in-death and death-in-life, an uncanny circling in a narrow ambit.”18 The mise-en-scène conjured by Miller’s descrip-tion evokes many of the Quays’ productions, including the diora-mas of the automatons in The Piano Tuner. The uncanny quality of animated detritus and the deadliness of the animated that Miller points to in Street of Crocodiles (1987) recalls Marker’s use of taxi-dermy in La Jetée. The scenes set in the Museum of Natural His-tory play on the uncanniness of “life-in-death and death-in-life” by exploiting the animating effect of photography upon taxidermy. The comparison with Marker extends what Miller has observed about the uncanny nature of the Quays’ subject matter, to the very form of stop-motion animation they employ. “Life-in-death and death-in-life” is emphatically at work in this technique, as the still frame within the moving image simultaneously arrests and engen-ders movement. In The Piano Tuner, the Quays take advantage of their uncanny medium to trace the fetish’s trajectory between the psychoanalytic dynamics of substitution and simulacrum and the “ambit” of the commodity fetish. Speaking of an automaton that


features rows of singing teeth, Felisberto remarks of the automa-tons in general that “I still do not know what their purpose was.” In this sense, for both Felisberto and the spectator, the automatons, which seem to be modeled on the ef!ciency and output-oriented nature of the factory machine, are without explicit purpose; their details and motions reject use-value, becoming sheer surplus or excess, a part or singular aspect of their whole.19 This moment in the !lm unites the doctor’s sexual fetish, the voice metonymized by the tongue, with the commodity fetish: the apparently purposeless automaton features the row of singing teeth that models the repeti-tion and substitutions of the psychoanalytic fetish.

As in many of the Quays’ short !lms, the body during sleep, a state that dichotomizes body and consciousness, is treated with particular attention. The tenuous relationship between part and whole, whereby for the commodity and psychoanalytic fetishes the part is taken as the whole, is most evident where The Piano Tuner focuses on Malvina’s sleeping body. In a scene that recalls the sleep-ing beauty from the Quays’ 1990 short The Comb, the camera pans left, !rst picturing Malvina’s sleeping legs and then revealing her torso beneath white sheets, !nally focusing on her face which we recognize and her hand. In another scene, Malvina throws her-self from her bed, shaking her limp hand as if it is still asleep and numb. In these instances, rather than dramatizing a coincidence of “life-in-death and death-in-life,” the Quays construct a scenario of sleep-in-wakefulness and wakefulness-in-sleep that defamiliarizes the organic material of the body from its consciousness (!gure 5). The image of Malvina’s body detached from itself, as her hands act independently from the rest of her body, gives visual representa-tion to the incommensurability that drives melancholia and fetish-ism as processes in which a part of the self is identi!ed as an other that, resisting cathexis, cannot be introjected.

These scenes link the dynamics of the fetish—as a simultane-ous interest in the maintenance of wholeness and of the special part divorced from the whole—to those of melancholia. The inde-pendence of Malvina’s hands suggests the fragmenting nature of a fetishistic desire as it prefers the body’s parts to the body. (The immaterial voice that the doctor desires is an extreme example of this; the voice is irresolvably divorced from the whole of the body.) The fragmentation of Malvina’s body by the camera’s fram-ing makes the cinematic apparatus complicit in accomplishing a sense of uncanny autonomy. In the scene where Malvina’s hands twitch in her sleep, the camera introduces us to her body not all at once but instead part by part, beginning with her legs and mov-ing up. At !rst we are unsure of what it is we are looking at. All the


camera gives us is a close-up of texture and shadow, and like the fetishist, we are forced to take the part as a whole image until the frame moves to her face, when we gain a sense of its relationship to a greater whole. The image of the body’s part gains the spatial equivalent to the contingency of the photogram in the context of !lm’s duration, a contingency highlighted by the Quays’ use of stop-motion animation. The part, be it a close-up or a photogram, disembodied from the whole, be it the absent wider establishing shot or the moving image captured at twenty-four frames per sec-ond, gains undetermined possibilities for meaning.

The Quays’ tendency to animate or repurpose bodies through their stop-motion techniques gains some resonance here as parts of Malvina’s body that have otherwise been the subject of her captor’s fetishism as well as his rendition of history gain the potential to act on their own, potentially contesting that history just as they contest their relationship to her body. The reanimation of Malvina’s body in this sequence thus acts as a metaphor of the ironic retention of possibilities at work in the pathological desires and memories of the melancholic and the fetishist that act against history’s closure. Marker’s use of the fractured body in La Jetée accomplishes a similar contestation when we are shown the impossibility of a child witness-ing his own death as a grown man, realized as the framing events of the narrative’s story. In both of these instances, the wound disem-bodied is evident in the persistence of a desire or a memory that remains in spite of physical, material, or historical impossibility.

These uncanny scenes in The Piano Tuner animate the notions of disembodiment that run throughout the !lm’s representation

Figure 5. Malvina shakes her own hand as if it is asleep, symbolizing the fragmentation of the fetishized body.


of history and time that, as Suzanne Buchan observes, is “less tied to a particular space-time” than the Quays’ previous feature-length !lm, Instituta Benjamenta.20 Malvina’s “disembodied” hands as well as the fragmentation of her body, achieved by the doctor’s desire and the camera’s framing, visually enact as a confrontation between part and whole, that tension between contingency and continuity that I have elaborated upon as it functions on a material level in the Quays’ !lm and as they allude to it in their !lm’s epigraph by Sallust. Understanding the timeless desires of the characters in the context of Marker’s “wound disembodied” helps us to understand how the Quays’ !lm confronts historical time with the “psychic locus” of memory, reinscribing narrative continuity with the con-tingency of memory just as their stop-motion animation process reinscribes the continuity of !lmic duration within the contingent possibilities of the photogram.

Notes1. “The Making of the Piano Tuner of Earthquakes,” The Piano Tuner of Earth-

quakes, DVD, directed by Stephen and Timothy Quay (New York: Zeitgeist Films, 2007).

2. Kaja Silverman, The Threshold of the Visible World (New York: Routledge, 1996), 186.

3. Ibid.4. Ibid., 188.5. Ibid., 189. For Marker, time signi!es “drift” and discontinuity rather than

“history,” which implies the endless perpetuation of the “same.”6. Mary Ann Doane, The Emergence of Cinematic Time: Modernity, Contingency, the

Archive (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), 106.7. The Quays mention this quality in the interview that accompanies the DVD.

The quality is also evident in numerous lines of dialogue in which a word is intention-ally inserted that makes the spectator unsure of what she or he has heard. Like the German-speaking detainers in La Jetée, one wonders whether the Quays have cast nonnative English speakers into all of the roles except Malvina’s to achieve this effect.

8. The Quays credit the curatorial vision of the Museum of Jurassic Technology in Los Angeles for inspiring this creative approach to ambiguity.

9. Eli Friedlander, “La Jetée: Regarding the Gaze,” boundary2 28, no. 1 (2001): 76.10. Walter Benjamin, “Little History of Photography,” in Walter Benjamin: Selected

Writings, Vol. 2, Part 2, 1931–1934, edited by Howard Eiland, Michael W. Jennings, and Gary Smith (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2005), 512.

11. Friedlander, “La Jetée,” 79.


12. Christian Metz, The Imaginary Signi!er: Psychoanalysis and Cinema (Blooming-ton: Indiana University Press, 1982), 72.

13. Sigmund Freud, “Mourning and Melancholia,” in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. 14, edited and translated by James Strachey, 243–58 (London: Hogarth, 1957).

14. Ibid., 249.15. Rebecca Comay, “The Sickness of Tradition: Between Melancholia and

Fetishism,” in Walter Benjamin and History, edited by Andrew Benjamin (New York: Continuum, 2005), 90.

16. Giorgio Agamben, Stanzas: Word and Phantasm in Western Culture, translated by Ronald L. Martinez (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992), 33.

17. Désiré-Magloire Bourneville and Paul Regnard, Iconographie photographique de la Salpêtrière [Photographic Iconography of the Salpêtrièr], 3 vols. (Paris: Delahaye & Cie, 1876–79).

18. Tyrus Miller, “‘Cut Out from Last Year’s Moldering Newspapers’: Bruno Schulz and the Brothers Quay on The Street of Crocodiles,” in Screening the City, edited by Mark Schiel and Tony Fitzmaurice (London: Verso, 2003), 85.

19. Suzanne Buchan argues that the machines featured in The Piano Tuner are unlike machines featured in the Quays’ previous work because they are “not purpose-less.” I suggest, following Felisberto’s baf"ement about what “they are for,” that these machines retain the fantastical excesses of the Quays’ earlier machine dioramas even while their ostensive purpose is to replicate Malvina’s voice. See Suzanne Buchan, The Quay Brothers: Into a Metaphysical Playroom (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011), 246.

20. Ibid., 248.

The Disembodied Wound of The Piano Tuner of Earthquakes: The Quay Brothers' 'Homage' to Chris Marker

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